TRANSITLAND - Key Persons
Drew Dara-Abrams Ph.D. is a co-founder and Principal at Interline Technologies. At Interline, Drew manages the firm's consulting engagements and product development. Drew's previous experience spans both industry and academic labs in transportation and geography.
His experience in industry includes serving as Head of Mobility Products for the Mapzen division of Samsung. While at Mapzen, he recruited and managed a team to build the Transitland open transit data platform, develop a worldwide routing/trip-planning engine, and build a global system to derive road traffic speeds from GPS data for The World Bank. Previously, Drew served as Chief Technology Officer for Kinnexxus, Inc. where he and his colleagues completed two successful Small Business Technology Transfer (SBIR) grants from the National Institutes of Health. He's developed and managed web applications serving upwards of millions of users, and has provided strategic, technical, and statistical consulting to major corporations, universities, and start-ups.
Drew holds a Ph.D. in computational geography from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and co-authored two textbooks, Supporting Web Servers and E-Commerce & Internet Law, published by Prentice-Hall.
Transportation Research Board with Drew Dara-Abrams serving as a member on the standing committee on transit data (AP090)
Ian Rees Ph.D. is a co-founder and Principal at Interline Technologies. At Interline, Ian leads engineering and operations efforts, building and maintaining open data pipelines to power publicly accessible trip planners, accessibility analysis, and data validation for Interline's clients.
Prior to Interline, Dr. Rees was a software engineer at Samsung's Mapzen division and technical lead of the Transitland project, an effort to create an open, user-contributed, user-editable, fully validated repository of all public GTFS data in the world. Previous to Samsung, Ian held postdoctoral positions at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Baylor College of Medicine, where he administered a data center and developed an online platform for biological imagery analysis.
Ian holds a B.S. in Biochemistry from the University of Houston, and a Ph.D. in Structural and Computational Biology from Baylor College of Medicine. Ian is proficient in several programming languages including Python, Ruby, and JavaScript, and is experienced building complex applications using PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker, Kubernetes, and all three of the major public clouds (Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure).